Folding Drying Rack

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This is a folding drying rack. Functional rather than beautiful.

The future daughter-in-law saw one draped with wet clothes in front of our fireplace on a rainy day in Oregon. She said they needed to get one. I thought it looked easy.

Biggest issue was the dowels, which go into the slats on the ends. In order for this thing to fold up, the center dowels are fixed to the inner slats but must spin freely in the outer slats. The dowels in the front and the back are the opposite: fixed to the outer slats but spin freely on the inner slats. That makes assembly . . . interesting. The fixed dowels are glued and have a #18 nail through. I was worried that glue might run into the hole that was supposed to be free spinning. Used some plastic wrap where I could get it in. Though not a perfect solution, it all worked out.

I also learned that my drill bits are pretty exact in diameter, but the dowels from a big box store vary a good bit. Very little of the dowels was exactly ½ inch; sometime over by 1/64, sometimes by 1/32. So the ends needed to be sanded down to ½.

One of my stupid moves was batching out the 16 slats. Then realized (based on the old rack my wife had bought years ago) that two of the lower slats were a little different. Then later realized that two at the top were different. Fortunately, had extra material. Aside from the dowels, all made from leftover material.

The slats are 3/4 x 1 1/2, with the holes for outer slats 1/2 inch deep. On an earlier attempt, I used 1/2 thick stock with 1/4 inch deep holes. Some of the dowels pulled out when the rack was stressed by a heavy blanket. This version is pretty sturdy. I learned a lot from making the first version. You have to make one to know how to make one.